Storing a very large number

[Ian Kelly]

On Wed, Jul 17, 2013 at 1:21 PM, Hasit Mistry <hasitnm at lavabit.com> wrote:
> I came across a problem that requires me to store a very large number (say
>>10^100). How do I do it efficiently?

Both the int and Decimal types support arbitrary precision.  Floats do not.

> And also, how do I select a particular number (say 209th) from that very
> large number?

You mean a particular digit?  The most obvious way is to format it as
a string and use indexing.

>>> x = 2 ** 1000
>>> str(x)[208]
'6'

Or using arithmetic:

>>> (x // 10 ** 208) % 10
5

Note that the first method counts digits from the left and will be off
if the value is negative, while the second method counts digits from
the right.